'Mr Q! Up you go!' Quilhampton waited his moment. As the boat rose he leapt, holding his wooden left hand clear and extending his right. He missed his footing but someone grabbed his extended arm and his abdomen caught on the edge of the channel. Hands grabbed the seat of his trousers and he was dragged inboard winded and gagging.
Only Drinkwater was left. He felt impossibly weak. Above him the whole ship's company watched. He was aware of Tregembo, wet to the skin and frozen after his ordeal, leaning outboard from the main chains. One hand was extended.
'Come on, zur!' he shouted, a trace of his truculent, Cornish independence clear in his eyes.
Drinkwater felt the boat rise sluggishly beneath him. She would not swim for many more minutes. He leaped upwards, aware that his outstretched arm was only inches from Tregembo's hand, but the boat fell away and he with it, suddenly up to his waist in water as the gig sank under him.
'Here, zur, here!'
He felt the rope across his shoulders and with a mighty effort passed a bight about his waist, holding the rope with his left hand and the loose end with his right. He felt himself jar against the barnacled spirketting and the weight on his left arm told where he hung suspended by its feeble grip, then that too began to slide while he tried to remember how to make a one-handed bowline with his right hand. Then Melusine gave a lee roll and a sea reached up under his shoulders. He was suddenly level with the rail, could see the faces lining the hammock nettings. In an instant the sea would drop away again as the sloop rolled to windward. He felt the support of the water begin to fall yet he was quite unable to remember how to make that first loop.
Then hands reached out for him. He was grabbed unceremoniously. The sea dropped away and he was pulled over the nettings and laid with gentle respect upon the deck. He looked up to see the face of Singleton.
'The mercy of God, Captain Drinkwater,' he said, 'has been extended to us all this day…'
And the fervent chorus of 'Amens' surprised even the semiconscious Drinkwater.
Chapter Ten
The Seventy-second Parallel
'Sir! Sir!'
Drinkwater swam upwards from a great depth and was aware that Midshipman Wickham was shaking him. 'Eh? What is it?'
'Mr Rispin's compliments, sir, but would you come on deck.'
'What time is it?'
'Nearly eight bells in the morning watch, sir.'
'Very well.' He longed to fling himself back into his cot for he had been asleep no more than three or four hours and every muscle in his body ached. He idled for a moment and heard a sudden wail of pipes at the companionways and the cry for all hands as Melusine's helm went down and she came up into the wind. Two minutes later, in a coat and greygoe that were still wet under his tarpaulin, he was on deck.
'The smell made me suspicious, sir,' cried Rispin, his voice high with anxiety, 'then the wind fell away and then we saw it…' He pointed.
Drinkwater's tired eyes focussed. Half a mile away, rearing into the sky and looming over their mastheads the iceberg seemed insubstantial in the grey light. But the smell, like the stink he had noticed in the ice lead, was strongly algaic and the loss of wind was evidence of its reality. Melusine seemed to wallow helplessly and, although Rispin had succeeded in driving her round onto the larboard tack, there seemed scarcely enough wind now to move her as the mass of ice loomed closer.
Drinkwater stood stupefied for a moment or two, trying to remember what he had learned from fragments of conversation with the whale-ship captains. It was little enough, and he felt the gaps in his knowledge like physical wounds at such a moment.
He had read of the submerged properties of icebergs, that far more of them existed below the level of the sea than above. Part of the monster that threatened them might already be beneath them.
'A cast of the lead, Mr Rispin, and look lively about it!'
Above his head Melusine's canvas slatted idly. 'T'gallant halliards there, topman aloft and let fall the t'gallants! Fo'c's'le head there! Set both jibs!' The waist burst into life as every man sought occupation. Drinkwater was left to reflect on Newton's observations upon the attraction of masses. Ship and iceberg seemed to be drawn inexorably together.
'By the mark seven, sir!'
'That'll be ice, sir,' Hill remarked, echoing his own thoughts.
'Aye.'
'Let fall! Let fall!' Lieutenant Bourne had taken the deck from Rispin and the topgallants hung in folds from their lowered yards.
'Hoist away!' The yards rose slowly, their parrels creaking up the slushed f gallant masts as the topmen slid down the backstays.
'Sheet home!'
'Belay!'
Amidships the braces were ready manned as the halliards stretched the sails. Watching anxiously Drinkwater thought he saw the upper canvas belly a little.
'By the mark five, sir!' The nearest visible part of the iceberg was half a musket shot away to starboard. Drinkwater sensed Melusine's deck cant slightly beneath his feet. He was so tense that for a moment he thought they had touched a spur of ice but suddenly Melusine caught the wind eddying round the southern extremity of the berg. Her upper sails filled, then her topsails; she began to move with gathering swiftness through the water.
'By the deep nine, sir!'
Drinkwater began to breathe again. Melusine came clear of the iceberg and the wind laid her on her beam ends. Just as suddenly as it had come the fog lifted. The wind swung to the north-northwest and blew with greater violence, but the sudden shift reduced the lift of the sea, chopping up a confused tossing of wave crests in which Melusine pitched wildly while her shivering topmen lay aloft again to claw in the topgallants they had so recently set.
As the visibility cleared it became apparent that the gale had dispersed the ice floes and they were surrounded by pieces of ice of every conceivable shape and size. Realising that he could not keep the deck forever, Drinkwater despatched first Bourne and then Rispin aloft to the crow's nest from where they shouted down directions to the doubled watches under Drinkwater and Hill, and for three days, while the gale blew itself out from the north they laboured through this vast and treacherous waste.
The huge bergs were easy to avoid, now that clear weather held, but the smaller bergs and broken floes of hummocked ice frequently required booming off from either bow with the spare topgallant yards. Worst of all were the 'growlers', low, almost melted lumps of ice the greater part of whose bulk lay treacherously below water. Several of these were struck and Melusine's spirketting began to assume a hairy appearance, the timber being so persistently scuffed by ice.
Drinkwater perceived the wisdom of a rig that was easily handled by a handful of men as Sawyers had claimed at Shetland. He also wished he had the old bomb vessel Virago beneath his feet, a thought which made him recollect his interview with Earl St Vincent. It seemed so very far distant now and he had given little thought to his responsibilities during the last few days, let alone the possibility of French privateers being in these frozen seas. He wished St Vincent had had a better knowledge of the problems of navigation in high latitudes and given him a more substantial vessel than the corvette. Lovely she might be and fast she might be, but the Greenland Sea was no place for such a thoroughbred.