?" No, poor
"Resolute"! Not one of them ever came back again! Not one of them meant
to. Summer came. August came. No one can tell how soon, but some day or
other this her icy prison broke up, and the good ship found herself on
her own element again; shook herself proudly, we cannot doubt, nodded
joyfully across to the "Intrepid," and was free. But alas! there was no
master to take latitude and longitude, no helmsman at the wheel. In
clear letters cast in brass over her helm there are these words,
"England expects each man to do his duty." But here is no man to heed
the warning, and the rudder flaps this way and that way, no longer
directing her course, but stupidly swinging to and fro. And she drifts
here and there,--drifts out of sight of her little consort,--strands on
a bit of ice floe now, and then is swept off from it,--and finds
herself, without even the "Intrepid's" company, alone on these blue seas
with those white shores. But what utter loneliness! Poor "Resolute"! She
longed for freedom,--but what is freedom where there is no law? What is
freedom without a helmsman! And the "Resolute" looks back so sadly to
the old days when she had a master. And the short bright summer passes.
And again she sees the sun set from her decks. And now even her topmasts
see it set. And now it does not rise to her deck. And the next day it
does not rise to her topmast. Winter and night together! She has known
them before! But now it is winter and night and loneliness all together.
This horrid ice closes up round her again. And there is no one to bring
her into harbor,--she is out in the open sound. If the ice drifts west,
she must go west. If it goes east, she must go east. Her seeming freedom
is over, and for that long winter she is chained again. But her heart is
true to old England. And when she can go east, she is so happy! and when
she must go west, she is so sad! Eastward she does go! Southward she
does go! True to the instinct which sends us all home, she tracks
undirected and without a sail fifteen hundred miles of that sea, without
a beacon, which separates her from her own. And so goes a dismal year.
"Perhaps another spring they will come and find me out, and fix things
below. It is getting dreadfully damp down there; and I cannot keep the
guns bright and the floors dry." No, good old "Resolute." May and June
pass off the next year, and nobody comes; and here you are all alone out
in the bay, drifting in this dismal pack. J