How many of her crew were alive, or had she a crew at all? If so, what were their sufferings--if abandoned, amid that world of ice, whither had they gone, and where had their perilous journey ended? On Greenland, on the Labrador, or in the grave?
These queries were for ever recurring to me, and that old beset ship--I had made up my mind that she _was_ old--was the first object to which my eyes turned when coming on deck in the morning, and the last at night. Fogs--the dense fogs of the Arctic seas--came on and shrouded us for days, till one's lungs almost filled with icy vapour, and the pulses of the heart seemed to freeze. The wind blew a gale at times, but the ice remained fast as adamant around us; but when the obscurity passed away, there lay the beset ship in the dim distance, wearing the same lifeless aspect as ever, so dreary and forlorn amid that waste of cold white glistening ice, with its endless vistas of hummocks and splintered bergs.
We became somewhat alarmed on discovering by observations that instead of drifting into southern latitudes, where the ice-fields are usually broken into floes, and a ship becomes free to shape her course in any direction, we were being borne almost due west, and with considerable rapidity. By this the temperature remained nearly the same, and our besetting, like that of our unfortunate neighbour, became a permanence, and would probably continue so, unless we weathered Cape Farewell, of which Hartly had some doubts at that season.
We had now reached the first week of April, and could only look forward to the early days of May, when the field-ice breaks up, and from the unknown seas and inlets of the north, floats southward in masses so mighty, that a girdle of ice, sometimes two hundred miles in breadth, environs the coasts of Newfoundland and the Labrador.
Ere long we became sensible of a tremendous pressure upon the sides of the brig, a pressure so great that her timbers in some places became distorted, and Hartly was seriously alarmed lest she might be crushed and destroyed.
This unwonted pressure rendered us very anxious, and inspired many with dread.
One night when it was greater than usual, I was on deck, and from thence ascended into the main-rigging a little way to contemplate the snow-covered scene--so vast, so silent, and so terrible in its beauty!