houted out at
the top of his voice, louder than we ever dreamt he could speak--`Hard
a-starboard! Down with the helm for your life!'

"Bill, the boatswain, and I, who were together at the wheel, jammed down
the spokes with all our strength; but the blessed brig wouldn't come up
to the wind as we wanted her. She wouldn't, although we both almost
hung on the wheel and wrenched it off the deck. `Hard up with the helm,
men, do you hear?' again sings out the chief officer, rushing aft as he
spoke. `Hard up, men! all our lives are at stake!'

"And the brig wouldn't come up, try all we could. Bill and I could have
screamed with rage; but in another minute we were laughing with joy.

"The light got clear; and there, to our horror, just where we wanted the
dear old brig to go--and she wouldn't go, like a sensible creature,
although we cursed her for not obeying the helm--was an enormous iceberg
rising out of the depths of the ocean, and towering above the masts of
the poor _Jane_, which I feel loth to call `cranky' any longer--as high
almost as the eyes could see, like the cliffs at Dover, only a hundred
yards higher, without exaggeration! If the brig had come up to the
wind, as Mr Stanchion sang out for us to make her, why, two minutes
after, she would have struck full into the iceberg, and running, as she
was, good fourteen knots and more under her jib and main-sail, her bows
would have stoved in, and we'd all have been in Davy Jones's locker
before we could have said Jack Robinson!

"As it was, we weren't out of danger by any means. There were icebergs
to the right of us; icebergs astern of us, by which we had passed
probably when Pat first complained of feeling the cold; icebergs ahead
of us, through which we would have gingerly to make our way, for we had
no option with the gale that was blowing but to keep the same course we
were on, as to lie to amidst all that ice would be more dangerous even
than moving on; and the big, enormous berg we had just escaped was on
our left, or port side properly speaking--looking, for all the world,
like a curving range of cliffs on some rock-bound coast, as it spread
out more than five or six miles in length. It was certainly the biggest
iceberg I ever saw in my life, beating to nothing all that I afterwards
noticed in the Arctic seas when I went north in the _Polaris_; and
perhaps that is the reason why all the ice mounds I saw there became so
dwarfed by comparison that they lo