For These Various Reasons, The Excitement In Our Little
Community Was Running High, And Conjectures Were Made, And Everything
Thought Of For Which The Captain Would Hail, When The Man Aloft Sung
Out - "Another Sail, Large On The Weather Bow!"
This was a little odd, but so much the better, and did not shake
our faith in their being sails.
At length the man in the top
hailed, and said he believed it was land, after all. "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.
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