recious to him. He was always solicitous about her not injuring her
health, and constantly entreated her mother to be careful of it. This
was so much the more curious, because the child did not like him, but
used to shrink away from him, and would not even put out her hand to him
without coaxing from others. I believe that every soul on board
frequently noticed this, and not one of us understood it. However, it
was such a plain fact, that John Steadiman said more than once when old
Mr. Rarx was not within earshot, that if the Golden Mary felt a
tenderness for the dear old gentleman she carried in her lap, she must be
bitterly jealous of the Golden Lucy.

Before I go any further with this narrative, I will state that our ship
was a barque of three hundred tons, carrying a crew of eighteen men, a
second mate in addition to John, a carpenter, an armourer or smith, and
two apprentices (one a Scotch boy, poor little fellow). We had three
boats; the Long-boat, capable of carrying twenty-five men; the Cutter,
capable of carrying fifteen; and the Surf-boat, capable of carrying ten.
I put down the capacity of these boats according to the numbers they were
really meant to hold.

We had tastes of bad weather and head-winds, of course; but, on the whole
we had as fine a run as any reasonable man could expect, for sixty days.
I then began to enter two remarks in the ship's Log and in my Journal;
first, that there was an unusual and amazing quantity of ice; second,
that the nights were most wonderfully dark, in spite of the ice.

For five days and a half, it seemed quite useless and hopeless to alter
the ship's course so as to stand out of the way of this ice. I made what
southing I could; but, all that time, we were beset by it. Mrs.
Atherfield after standing by me on deck once, looking for some time in an
awed manner at the great bergs that surrounded us, said in a whisper, "O!
Captain Ravender, it looks as if the whole solid earth had changed into
ice, and broken up!" I said to her, laughing, "I don't wonder that it
does, to your inexperienced eyes, my dear." But I had never seen a
twentieth part of the quantity, and, in reality, I was pretty much of her
opinion.

However, at two p.m. on the afternoon of the sixth day, that is to say,
when we were sixty-six days out, John Steadiman who had gone aloft, sang
out from the top, that the sea was clear ahead. Before four p.m. a
strong breeze springing up right astern, we we