"Land In
Your Eye!" Said The Mate, Who Was Looking Through A Telescope;
"They Are Ice Islands, If I Can
See a hole through a ladder;" and a
few moments showed the mate to be right and all our expectations
Fled; and instead of what we most wished to see, we had what we
most dreaded, and what we hoped we had seen the last of. We soon,
however, left these astern, having passed within about two miles
of them; and at sundown the horizon was clear in all directions.
Having a fine wind, we were soon up with and passed the latitude
of the Cape, and having stood far enough to the southward to give
it a wide berth, we began to stand to the eastward, with a good
prospect of being round and steering to the northward on the
other side, in a very few days.
But ill luck seemed to have lighted upon us. Not four hours had
we been standing on in this course, before it fell dead calm;
and in half an hour it clouded up; a few straggling blasts,
with spits of snow and sleet, came from the eastward; and in
an hour more, we lay hove-to under a close-reefed main topsail,
drifting bodily off to leeward before the fiercest storm that we
had yet felt, blowing dead ahead, from the eastward. It seemed
as though the genius of the place had been roused at finding that
we had nearly slipped through his fingers, and had come down upon
us with tenfold fury. The sailors said that every blast, as it
shook the shrouds, and whistled through the rigging, said to the
old ship, "No, you don't!" - "No, you don't!"
For eight days we lay drifting about in this manner. Sometimes, -
generally towards noon, - it fell calm; once or twice a round copper
ball showed itself for a few moments in the place where the sun ought
to have been; and a puff or two came from the westward, giving some
hope that a fair wind had come at last. During the first two days,
we made sail for these puffs, shaking the reefs out of the topsails
and boarding the tacks of the courses; but finding that it only made
work for us when the gale set in again, it was soon given up, and we
lay-to under our close-reefs.
We had less snow and hail than when we were farther to the westward,
but we had an abundance of what is worse to a sailor in cold
weather - drenching rain. Snow is blinding, and very bad when
coming upon a coast, but, for genuine discomfort, give me rain
with freezing weather. A snow-storm is exciting, and it does not
wet through the clothes (which is important to a sailor); but a
constant rain there is no escaping from. It wets to the skin,
and makes all protection vain. We had long ago run through all
our dry clothes, and as sailors have no other way of drying them
than by the sun, we had nothing to do but to put on those which
were the least wet.
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