The Frozen Pirate

ngular crystal fossil of a ship, and considering whether I should

ed myself to believe that, first, it would take me longer to penetrate and search her than it was proper I should be away from the boat; that, second, it was scarce to be supposed her crew had left any provisions in h

started for the body under the rock, and with some pain and staggering, th

ifelike that, though I knew him to be a corpse, had he risen on a sudden the surprise of it could hardly have shocked me more than the astonishment his posture raised. As a skeleton he could not have so chill

neck. I felt like a thief, and stole a glance over either shoulder as though, forsooth, some strangely clad companion of his should be creeping upon me unawares. Then, thought I, since I have the c

t clouds were congregating there, and some of them blowing up to where the sun hung, these resembling in shape and colour the compact puff of the first discharge of a cannon before the smoke spreads on the air. What should I do? I sank into a miserable perplexity. If it was going to blow what good could attend my departure from this island? It was an adverse wind, and when it freshened I could not choose but run before it, and that would drive me clean away from the direction I required to steer in. Yet if I was to wait

s to say, I looked towards the part of the ice where the little hav

t the haven; but the rock that had formed it was gone, the blue swell rolled brimming past the line of shore there, and my eye following the swing of a fo

cking off my boots and plunging into the water, but, mad as I was, I was not so mad as that; and mad I should have been to attempt it, for I cou

, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my head burning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myself down and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to God for help and mercy

stand how my misfortune had come about. It was likely enough that the very crevice in which I had jammed the mast to secure the boat by w

t was lost, and I was to be a prisoner on the death-haunted waste, that I fell down in a sort of swoon, like one partly stunned, and had any person co

unequal surfaces, and spun with a hollow note past my ear; and the thunder of the breakers on the other side of the island was deepening its tone. The sea was lifting and whitening; something of mistiness had grown up over the horizon that made a blue duln

to hurt a man; what more pitiful and harmless than a poor unburied corpse?" I answer, "True," and declare that of the two bodies, as dead men, I was not afraid; but this mass of frozen solitude was about them, and they took a frightful character from it; they communicated an element of death to the desolation of the snow-clad island; their presence made a principalit

me, "A man can die but once. He'll not perish the quicker for contemplating his end with a stout heart." He that so spoke is dead. The worst is over for him. Were he a babe resting upon his mother's breast he could not sleep more soundly, be more tenderly lulled

they had availed, I don't doubt. But I was chilled to the marrow; the mere knowing that there was nothing to eat sharpened my appetite, and I felt

interior and seeking shelter in a fabric that time and frost and death had wrought into a black mystery was dreadful to me. Nor was this all. It seemed like the very last expression of despair to board that stirless frame; to make a dwel

aping from the island? Assuredly there was plenty of material in her for the building of a boat, if I could meet with tools. Or possibly I might find a boat under hatches, for

ble languishing end for me here, I could not but believe that there was certain death, too, out there in that high swell and in those sharpening peaks of water off whose foaming heads the wind was blowing the spray. By which I mea

y situation, even to the extent of being willing to believe that on the whole it was perhaps as well that I should have been hindered from putting to sea in my little eggshell. So at every step we rebel at th

t the sun was leaping from one edge to another and darting a keen and frosty light upon the scene. The wind was bitterly cold, and screamed shrilly in my ears when I met the full tide of it. The change was sudden, but it did not surprise me. I knew these se

teeples or pillars of ice. My heart was dismayed again by the figure of the man. He was more dreadful than the other because of the size to which the frozen snow upon his head, trunk, and limbs had swelled him; and the half-rise of his face was particularly startling, as if he were in the very act of running his gaze softly upwards. That he should

one in my condition to light

olute, and would have gone back had there been any place to return to. I plucked up after a little, and, rolling up the cloak into a compact b

es you sometimes encounter on the sides of mountains near the base; and I had again and again to fetch a compass so as to gain

unable to guess at the condition of the hull. She had a most absurd swelling bilge, and her buttocks, viewed on a line with her rudder, doubtless presented the exact appearance of an apple. She was sunk in snow to some planks above the garboard-streak, but her lines forward were fine, making her almost wedge-shaped, though the flair of her bows was great, so that she swelled up like a balloon to the catheads. She had something of the look of the barca-lon

precipitous here, full of cracks and flaws and sharp projections. Indeed, had the breadth of the island been as it was at the extremity I might have

. Let it be remembered that I was a sailor, with the superstitious feelings of my calling in me, and though I do not know that I actually believed in ghosts and apparitions and spectrums, yet I felt as if I did; particularly upon the deck of this silent ship, rendered spirit-like by the grave of ice in which she lay and by the long years (as I could not doubt) during which she had thus rested. Hence, whe

hought laughable enough; nor was my imagination soothed by the clear, harping, ringing sounds of the wi

ng on to the poop-deck, fell to an examination of the companion or covering