, there 's
ice close aboard!" As he spoke the words, there arose a loud and
fearful cry from the forecastle.

"Ice right ahead, sir!"

"Ice right ahead, sir!" repeated the chief mate, whipping round upon
the captain.

"I see it, sir! I see it, sir!" roared the skipper. "Hard a
starboard, men! Hard a starboard for your lives! Over with it!"

The two fellows at the helm sent the spokes flying like the
driving-wheel of a locomotive; the long ship, upborne at the instant
by a huge Pacific sea, paid off like a creature of instinct, sweeping
slowly but surely to port just in time. For right on the starboard bow
of us there leapt out into proportions terrible and magnificent, within
a musket shot of our rail, an iceberg that looked as big as St. Paul's
Cathedral, with stormy roaring of the gale in its ravines and valleys,
and the white smoke of the snow revolving about its pinnacles and
spires like volumes of steam, and a volcanic noise of mighty seas
bursting against its base and recoiling from the adamant of its
crystalline sides in acres of foam. We were heading for it at the rate
of thirteen miles an hour as neatly as you point the end of a thread
into the eye of a needle. In a few minutes we should have been into
it, crumbled against it, dissolved upon the white waters about it, and
have met a nameless end. Boy as I was, and bitter as was the day, I
remember feeling a stir in my hair as I stood watching with open mouth
the passage of the mountainous mass close alongside into the pale void
astern, whilst the ship trembled again to the blows and thumps of vast
blocks of floating ice.

"Ice right ahead, sir!" came the cry again, nor could we clear the
jumble of bergs until the dusk had settled down, when we hove-to for
the night. No one was hurt, but I suppose no closer shave of the kind
ever happened to a ship before.

Again, and this time once more off Cape Horn. It was my third voyage;
I was still a midshipman, and in the second mate's watch. I came on
deck at midnight and found the ship hove-to, breasting what in this
age of steamboats, and, for the matter of that, perhaps in any other
age, might be termed a terrific sea. She was making good weather of
it--that is to say, she kept her decks dry, but she was diving and
rolling most hideously, with such swift headlong shearing of her spars
through the gale that the noises up in the blackness aloft were as
though the spirits of the inmates of a thousand lunatic asyl