schooner's release from the ice had come upon me so
suddenly, and at a time too when my mind was terribly disordered, that I
scarce realized the full meaning of it until I had shifted myself and
fortified my heart with a dram and got warm in the glow of the furnace.
By this time she had fallen into the trough and was labouring like a
cask; that she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way a single glance
at her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but I
never could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillation
was rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when I
could not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over her
starboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of the
poop-deck kept the after part of the vessel indifferently dry, and the
forecastle and main hatches were well secured. But there was one great
peril I knew not how to provide against--I mean the flotilla of icebergs
in the north and west. They lay in a long chain upon the sea, and though
to be sure there was no doubt a wide channel between each, through which
it might have been easy to carry a ship under control, yet there was
every probability of a vessel in the defenceless condition of the
schooner, without a stitch of sail on her and under no other government
of helm than a fixed rudder, being swept against one of those frozen
floating hills when indeed it would be good-night to her and to me too,
for after such a catastrophe the sun would never rise for me or her
again.

Meanwhile I was crazy to ascertain if the schooner was taking in water.
If there was a sounding-rod in the ship I did not know where to lay my
hands upon it. But he is a poor sailor who is slow at substitutes.
There were several spears in the arms-room (piratical plunder, no doubt)
with mere spikes for heads, like those weapons used by the Caffres and
other tribes in that country; they were formed of a hard heavy wood. I
took a length of ratline line and secured it to one of these spears, and
carried it on deck with the powder-room bull's-eye lamp; but when I
probed the sounding-pipe I found it full of ice, and as it was
impossible to draw the pumps, I flung my ingenious sounding-rod down in
a passion of grief and mortification.

Yet was I not to be beaten. Such was my temper, had the devil himself
confronted me, I should have defied him to do his worst, for I had made
up my mind to weather him out. I