ssed on without taking any notice."

I caught Mr. Sweers' eye. "You'll do," said he, and in a few minutes
he and I were pulling away in the direction of the ice, I in the bow
and he aft, rowing fisherman fashion, face forward. The schooner had
backed her yards on the fore when she was within a mile of the berg,
and we had not far to row. Our four arms made the fat little
jolly-boat buzz over the wrinkled surface of the green, cold water.
The wreck--if a wreck she could be called--lay with her decks sloping
seawards upon an inclined shelf or beach of ice, with a mass of
rugged, abrupt stuff behind her, and vast coagulated lumps heaped like
a Stonehenge at her bows and at her stern. When we approached the
beach, as I may term it, Salamon Sweers said:

"I'll tell you what: I am not going to board that craft alone, Kerry.
Who's to tell what's inside of her? She may have been lying twenty
years, for all we know, frozen up where it's always day or always
night--where everything's out of the order of nature, in fact; and rat
me if I'm going to be the first man to enter her cabin."

"I'm along with you," said I.

"So you are, David," said he, "and we'll overhaul her together, and
the best way to secure the boat'll be to drag her high and dry"; and
as he said this, the stem of the boat touched the ice, and we both of
us jumped out, and, catching hold of her by the gunwale, walked her up
the slope by some five times her own length, where she lay as snug as
though chocked aboard her own mother, the schooner.

Sweers and I stood, first of all, to take a view of the barque--for a
barque she was: her topgallantmasts down, but her topsail and lower
yards across, sails bent, all gear rove, and everything right so far
as we could see, saving that her flying jib-boom was gone. There was
no need to look long at her to know that she hadn't been one of
Franklin's ships. Her name and the place she hailed from were on her
stern: the _President_, New Bedford. And now it was easy to see that
she was a Yankee whaler. Her sides bristled with cranes or davits for
boats, but every boat was gone. The tackles were overhauled, and the
blocks of two of them lay upon the ice. She was a stout, massive,
round-bowed structure, to all appearances as sound as on the day when
she was launched. She was coppered; not a sheet of metal was off, not
a rent anywhere visible through the length and breadth of the dingy
green surface of it.

We first of all wal